


On Tenterhooks

by everheartings



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, in which everyone is faeries
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-15
Updated: 2013-10-15
Packaged: 2017-12-29 12:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1005642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everheartings/pseuds/everheartings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jehan was born from the summer. A child of heat wave madness--come July you'll see his razor sharp smile from between the trees (do not hesitate. Run or you will be taken).</p>
<p>(just another faerie!AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Tenterhooks

**Author's Note:**

> So this is going to be a two shot (maybe longer if I feel like it?), though I'm not quite sure when I'll get around to the second part. However, I still tagged everyone who's going to be in it in the second half because this is just the introduction and next part will have more people.
> 
> Though there are ambiguous mentions of many of the characters just they're unnamed so use your detective skills hopefully it isn't too hard.
> 
> also this is for watchmenning because she likes faeries okay, so enjoy Matilda!!!!!

Jehan closes his eyes and he hears trumpets. Or not trumpets _exactly_ , but close enough to be called that (Jehan doesn’t quite know what they are, but he can guess).

There a days when he can work around it; he walks into class with his hair pulled high up on his head (there are bells today, dangling from the elastic band) and his hands loose in his pockets. He pulls out a clean notebook. His writing is sharp and neat, like a girl who’s had it drilled _perfection_ into her from the moment she was born. On those days Jehan can quote Shakespeare and Keats from memory—once he recited some of Spenser’s _The Faerie Queene_ , words rolling off his tongue without having to think. He’s the happiest when they read about the world beyond, between, and within their own, with creatures beautiful in their fatality (though his lips twist and his eyes narrow when his teachers try to find meaning in the actions of faeries; they pick apart text like it’s an animal to be stripped bare to the bones, assigning meaning where they see fit. As if a faerie would do anything except for its own pleasure. _Fools_ ).

But there are days when it is just the trumpets pushing him into the woods and he doesn’t go to school at all (Jehan does _things_ then, with wild hair and sharpened teeth and bloody palms. The forest calls his name. He sees twisted smiles and bronzed skin hiding in the gaps between the trees). He’ll make his way back home and curl up with a book; his writing wraps around the margins, a harsh scrawl. He’ll laugh at his father’s bad jokes and eat his mother’s cooking—and even though news spreads like wildfire in their small town, no one brings up how a wolf got at a herd of cattle, or how the latch of a neighboring farm’s paddock broke and the sheep wandered into the forest (maybe that farmer had looked the wrong way—a curl of the lips when Jehan passed by—or said the wrong thing— _Why in God’s name would you put that shit in your hair_ —or maybe he did nothing at all).

Like a good son, Jehan will clean his dishes and turn off his light at a decent hour (he falls asleep to the sound of bells in his ears. He dreams of a white haired queen with bronze skin, bare feet, and a crown of wildflowers set upon her brow. There’s a clumsy, blush dusted boy kissing her thighs).

\---

Jehan grew up a scrawny kid with freckles and a gap-tooth grin, whose ginger hair grew like a weed. He’d sneak out into the forest that sat on the edges of his backyard to explore; his room was a clutter of plants, rocks—and books, always books (Jehan smiles good-naturedly when people laugh and say that he was born with a novel in his hands. Their laughter’s gone later when their car won’t start or when tacks appear on the bed room floor for weeks to come).

Jehan learned quick enough to smile wide and look innocent—when the neighbor’s cat went missing no one suspected the sweet boy reading a book beneath the tree (no one would have believed him when he said _“the trumpets made me to do it,”_ anyways).

\---

The trumpets are the quietest in the winter, just the softest of whispers. The silence should make it easier to focus, but it doesn’t. The emptiness shakes him; it presses at the vault of his ribcage and the curve of his forehead. Jehan’s eyes drift, the words written on the white board of his English class curling into dark shapes (creatures lurking in the edges of his vision, bells tinkling in the wind, a crown of ice). He tries to blink them away, shaking his head and rubbing at his eyes, but it only cements the shapes in his vision (a queen on a throne with her two _pets_ at her feet. Jehan has never had a pet; he thinks he might want one, but he’s never found anyone he likes enough to make his own). The bell rings and the shapes snap back into words; Jehan brushes his things into his backpack and leaves the classroom in a daze.

He cuts class for the rest of the day. During passing period, Jehan slips out the doors and heads into the forest. He crunches through the snow, breath pooling in front of his face. He walks in silence until his legs grow sore and his fingers grow numb; he stops beneath a skeleton-fingered tree. His backpack slips from his shoulders and into the snow with a muffled thump.

Jehan shuts his eyes and tips his head back—still, just the faintest of bugles. He lies down, eyes shut and snowflakes frosting his lashes. His lips turn blue and his clothes soak through (he ignores the hollowness to his chest and thinks of summer instead). He squeezes his eyes shut tight and strains his ears, but the sound stays faint as ever. The empty feeling spreads down Jehan’s bones; no matter how many years he goes through this he never grows used to it.

Winter drains Jehan—his mind grows sluggish and his limbs clumsy. His skin turns pale and his temper thinner than before. He walks down the road with hunched shoulders and hands pressed deep into his pockets (people are found wandering in the forest half-dead without any recollection of how they got there; Jehan may hate winter, but that doesn’t mean he won’t use it to his advantage). Jehan lets his mother cluck over him, lets her press mugs of tea in his hands and wrap scarfs around his neck. But that does nothing. The chill is too deeply set. It only fades with the return of the trumpets.

And the trumpets _always_ return, blazing in Jehan’s ears with the heat of summer. He lies outside in just shorts, arms and legs splayed out as the heat presses against his skin. A wilted flower crown perches on his head. Then his eyes slip shuts—there go the trumpets. Jehan smiles as they pluck at his bones, pulling him up. They lead him through town; the asphalt burns at his feet (the heat travels up through the soles and the arches, thrumming through him. It feels powerful).

The trumpets reach a crescendo and Jehan stops. “ _Oh_ ,” he murmurs, “I was wondering when you’d get on with it.” A smile curves across his face (July is fast approaching).

The trumpets are the loudest in July; so loud that they rattle his teeth. The sound of trumpets and bells and hoof beats roar through him, even with his eyes forced open. It’s all he can do to curl up on his bed, press his hands to his ears, and try his best not to scream (he forgets then. He lets himself be consumed by the vision of a white haired queen on a pitch black horse, a golden-haired man with a deer skull hiding his face riding at her side, and legions of tumbling masses shrieking behind them).

The day after Jehan slips his hands off his ears and uncurls his stiff limbs. He stumbles down the stairs and falls onto the couch; from there he can hear the hushed voices of his parents coming from the kitchen. He doesn’t bother to listen in earnest, nor does he turn on the television. It’s been sixteen years. Jehan knows the routine by now.

Another child missing, plucked right out of their beds in the middle of the night—Jehan wonders why they don’t bother to leave replacements, but then again, one faerie-child in this town is enough. His mother comes out to stroke his hair and kiss his forehead, but Jehan doesn’t miss the shadow of his father in the doorway—there is trepidation in the line of his arm and the curve of his fingers (Jehan thinks that perhaps his father knows more than he lets on).

Then come the weeks of curfews and solemn news reports. The police cars on every corner make Jehan cagey—when two officers knock on his front door to talk to his parents he glares from the staircase. When they turn to face him, the glare slips from his face, replaced with a carefully constructed smile (I mean no harm, move on, move on).

(I will come and strike when you least expect it.)

“And where were you yesterday?” one asks.

“I was at home all day,” he says. There are more questions like that— _did you know the family, the child, anyone who might do this—_ and Jehan loses patience fast. His smile grows tight and his fingers tap against the wooden steps (it’s the same every year, same questions, same warnings. It’s all rather boring, if you ask him). The officers go back to talking to his parents—when the police car finally pulls out of the driveway, Jehan breathes a sigh of relief.

The streets are empty of children when Jehan goes out to get groceries (when he sees the posters stapled to light posts and taped to doors he bites his lips bloody to keep from smiling).

\---

It’s probably for the best when Jehan turns seventeen and he buys the first train ticket to the city.

He doesn’t even say good-bye, just packs up his things and leaves. He slips away as he walks to school, dropping his phone in the river. He sprints to the station, head down and backpack heavy against his back. He makes it on the train with time to spare—he spends ten agonizing minutes tapping his feet and waiting for the police to come walking down the aisle to haul him back to school (or worse, _they_ might come. Jehan thinks he could slit a couple officers’ throats no problem, but his own kind? He’s not too sure).

But the train pulls out of the station—no officers, no sun-kissed, sharp-toothed messengers. Jehan rests his head against the cool glass of the window with a relieved sigh; his eyes track the forest slipping by him. They slide shut and he hears trumpets (the forest pulls at him, whispering his name, begging him not to leave. It hurts worse than iron against his skin. But though he dreams of sun kissed queens he never was the trooping type. He much preferred the company of a handful or no one at all).

He dozes against the glass, his backpack placed at his feet, his hands curled around an old, beat up reference guide; the cover is brown leather, the only color from the white butterfly-winged figure printed on the cover (Jehan had laughed when he’d seen that—as if faeries have _wings._ Leave those to the pixies and the poukahs). Jehan drifts to sleep with bells in his ears and he smiles (he thinks he’ll find others like him in the city, with malice in their bones and lights in their eyes. He’s dreamt of two dark figures in his bed, long limbed and cool mouthed, who bite and fight and steal and breathe ice into his skin—Jehan thinks he’ll like it in the city).


End file.
